Note
that inclusion in these averages does not imply that an institution has
significant inflation. Data on the GPAs for each institution where I
don’t have a confidentiality agreement can be found at the bottom of
this web page. Institutions comprising this average were chosen
strictly because they have either published grade data or have sent
recent data (2012 or newer) to the author covering a span of at least
eleven years.

Last major update, March 29, 2016

Introduction

This web site began as the data link to an op-ed piece I wrote on grade inflation for the Washington Post, Where All Grades Are Above Average,
back in January 2003. In the process of writing that article, I
collected data on trends in grading from about 30 colleges and
universities. I found that grade inflation, while waning beginning in
the mid-1970s, resurfaced in the mid-1980s. The rise continued unabated
at almost every school for which data were available. By March 2003, I
had collected data on grades from over 80 schools. Then I stopped
collecting data until December 2008, when I thought it was a good time
for a new assessment. At that time, I started working with Chris
Healy from Furman University. We collected data from over 170
schools, updated this website, wrote a research paper, collected more data the following year and wrote another research paper.

In
late 2015, at the request of more than a few people, I decided to work
with Chris Healy on another update. Chris has done the lion’s
share of data collection. We now have data on average grades from
over 400 schools (with a combined enrollment of over four million
undergraduates). I want to thank those who have helped us by
either sending data or telling us where we can find data. I also
want to thank those who have sent me emails on how to improve my
graphics. Additional suggestions are always welcome. Send them to me,
Stuart Rojstaczer, at: fortyquestions at gmail.com.

The Two Modern Eras of Grade Inflation

College
grading on an A-F scale has been in widespread use for about 100
years. Early on, it was sometimes referred to as “scientific
grading.” Until the Vietnam War, C was the most common grade on
college campuses. That was true for over fifty years. Then
grades rose dramatically. A’s became much more common (see figure
below) and C’s, D’s and F’s declined (there’s more discussion of this
topic at the end of this post) in popularity. GPA’s rose on
average by 0.4 points. By 1973, the GPA of an average student at
a four-year college was 2.9. A’s were twice as common as they
were before the 1960s, accounting for 30% of all A-F grades.

Why
did this happen? The reasons were complex. Here’s an
attempt at a simplified explanation. Faculty attitudes about
teaching and grading underwent a profound shift that coincided with the
Vietnam War. Many professors, certainly not all or even a
majority, became convinced that grades were not a useful tool for
motivation, were not a valid means of evaluation and created a harmful
authoritarian environment for learning. Added to this shift
was a real-life exigency. In the 1960s, full-time male college
students were exempt from the military draft. If a male college
student flunked out, chances were that he would end up as a soldier in
the Vietnam War, a highly unpopular conflict on a deadly
battlefield. Partly in response to changing attitudes about the
nature of teaching and partly to ensure that male students maintained
their full-time status, grades rose rapidly. When the war ended
so did the rise in grades. Perhaps the attitude shift of many
professors toward grading needed the political impetus of an unpopular
war to change grading practices across all departments and campuses. I
call this period the Vietnam era of grade inflation.

The
rise in college grades during the Vietnam War was well
documented. In particular, one college administrator from
Michigan State, Arvo Juola, collected annual average GPAs from colleges
and universities across the country. This one-man undertaking
well before the computer era was impressive. There were some
people who maintained grades were rising in the Vietnam era because
students in the 1960s and early 1970s were better than those over the
previous fifty years, but the conventional wisdom was that those claims
were unfounded.

At the
end of the Vietnam era of grade inflation, Juola wrote a short and
prescient paper that both documented the end of the era and warned
against further inflation in the future. That “future” began ten
years later.

In the
early 1980s, college grades began to rise again, but at a slow and
barely identifiable pace. By the late 1980s, GPA’s were rising at a
rate of 0.1 points per decade (see top chart), a rate 1/4 of that
experienced during the Vietnam era (the pace was so slow that until the
2000s it wasn’t entirely clear that it was a national
phenomenon). A’s were going up by about five to six percentage
points per decade. During that time, there was something else new
under the sun on college campuses. A new ethos had developed
among college leaders. Students were no longer thought of as
acolytes searching for knowledge. Instead they were
customers. Phrases like “success rates” began to become buzz
phrases among academic administrators. A former university
chancellor from the University of Wisconsin, David Ward, summed up this
change well in 2010:

“That
philosophy (the old approach to teaching) is no longer acceptable to
the public or faculty or anyone else. . . . Today, our attitude is we
do our screening of students at the time of admission. Once students
have been admitted, we have said to them, “You have what it takes to
succeed.” Then it’s our job to help them succeed.”

During
this era, which has yet to end, student course evaluations of classes
became mandatory, students became increasingly career focused, and
tuition rises dramatically outpaced increases in family income. When
you treat a student as a customer, the customer is, of course, always
right. If a student and parent of that student want a high grade,
you give it to them. Professors faced a new and more personal
exigency with respect to grading: to keep their leadership happy (and
to help ensure their tenure and promotion) they had to focus on keeping
students happy. It’s not surprising that grades have gone up
during this era. I call this period of grade inflation the
“student as consumer era” or the “consumer era” for short.

By
the mid-to-late 1990s, A was the most common grade at an average
four-year college campus (and at a typical community college as
well). By 2013, the average college student had about a 3.15 GPA
(see first chart) and forty-five percent of all A-F letter grades were
A’s (see second chart). If you pay more for a college education
in the consumer era, then you of course get a higher grade. By
2013, GPA’s at private colleges in our database were on average over
0.2 points higher than those found at public schools.

Long Term Trends

The
above graphs represent averages. What about grade changes over
the last fifty years at individual institutions? I can show those
changes at most schools in our database. The figure below shows
the amount of GPA rise for all schools where we have current data at
least 15 years in length (and don’t have confidentiality agreements)
and maps it to the number of years we have data for each school. The
blue line is the expected amount of GPA rise a school would have if it
were a garden-variety grade inflator. It’s essentially the
percent A’s curve of the second figure in terms of GPA, flipped
horizontally and then vertically.

In
previous versions of this graph posted on this web site, the blue-line
equivalent was a best-fit regression to the data. For those who
liked the old blue-line (and I’ve seen the PowerPoint slides of college
administrators who’ve used this graph and liked to use that line to
compare their school’s grade inflation – which they usually publicly
avow doesn’t exist – with national averages), the rate of grade
inflation for the new dataset over the entire 50 years of college grade
inflation (both the Vietnam era and the consumer era) averages 0.14 GPA
points per decade, the same as it was in our previous update.

Some
schools aren’t labeled because they cluster together and hug the blue
line over the last 15 to 25 years: Brown, DePauw, Hampden-Sydney, Iowa
State, Roanoke, Rensselaer, SUNY-Oswego, UC-San Diego, Virginia, West
Georgia, and Western Michigan. CSU-San Bernardino almost
completely overlaps UW-Milwaukee.

There
are a small number of schools (about 15% of all schools in our
database) that have experienced only modest increases in GPAs over the
last 15 to 20 years, but most of them have average GPAs that already
exceed 3.0. There are no schools in our dataset that have been
untouched by rising grades over the last 50 years. Grades went up
significantly at all schools in our database in both the Vietnam era
and the first half of the consumer era. That said, a few schools have
had modest to negligible recent grade rises (and rarely, modest drops
in grades) and have relatively low GPAs, as will be discussed in the
next section.

It’s worth
looking at GPA rises at schools for which we have 50 years or more of
data. These schools’ data show the full extent of both the
Vietnam era rise and the consumer era rise up until 2012-15 (the years
of our most current data for schools). The range in what these
two periods of inflation combined have done to college grades is wide,
but it is always significant. At Texas State, a historically low
inflator, the average graduate’s GPA has migrated from a C+ to a
B. At Duke, a high inflator, the average graduate’s GPA has
migrated from a C+/B- to an A-.

Not
all of the grade rises observed at these schools are due to
inflation. At private schools like Duke and Elon and at public
schools like Florida and Georgia, the caliber of student enrolled is
higher than it was thirty or fifty years ago. But as is discussed
three sections down, their rises in average GPA are mainly due to the
same factor found at other schools: professors are grading easier year
by year by a tiny amount.

The
observed grade change nationwide in the consumer era is the equivalent
of every class of 100 making two B students into B+ students every year
and alternating between making one A- student into an A student and one
B+ student into an A- student every year. It’s so incrementally
slow a process that it’s easy to see why an individual instructor (or
university administrator or leader) can delude himself into believing
that it’s all due to better teaching or better students. But
after 30 years of professors making these kinds of incremental changes,
the amount of rise becomes so large that what’s happening becomes
clear: mediocre students are getting higher and higher grades.
It’s perhaps worth noting that if you strictly applied the above
grading changes in a typical class of 100 at a four-year college today,
you’d run out of B students to elevate to B+ students in about seven
years.

Statements
have been made by some that grade inflation is confined largely to
selective and highly selective colleges and universities. The three
charts above indicate that these statements are not correct.
Significant grade inflation is present everywhere and contemporary
rates of change in GPA are on average the same for public and private
schools.

Recent Trends in Grade Inflation

The
charts below examine the magnitude of the rate of grade inflation for
almost all of the institutions for which we have sufficient data to
examine contemporary trends (some data, in particular data from private
schools, comes attached with confidentiality agreements). The average
GPA change since 2000 at both public and private schools is 0.10 points
per decade, but the range is wide.

The
two charts for public schools indicate that the tendency is for schools
with high average GPAs to also have high rates of contemporary change
and for schools with low average GPAs to continue to have low rates of
change. Essentially, the gap keeps widening between the high and low
GPA schools. Flagship state schools in the South have the highest
contemporary rates of grade inflation for this sample of public
schools. Historically, they had low GPAs and appear to be
“catching up” to schools in the North. This was true for almost
all of the Southern flagship schools in the 1990s as well.

Some
schools that were relatively immune to grade inflation in the 1990s,
such as University of Nebraska-Kearney and Purdue, have experienced
significant consumer-era inflation in the 2000s. Recent inflation
rates are relatively low at many flagship state schools in the
Midwest. At about nine out of fifty schools, consumer era
inflation has essentially ended at least temporarily. University
of Colorado made a top-down decision to control grades and those
efforts have had an effect on professors’ grading behavior.
CSU-San Bernardino has become less selective in accepting students in
response to budgetary pressures. Coastal Carolina and Texas State
have relatively low GPAs and have been relatively resistant to grade
inflation over the last 50 years. The reason for the negligible
(and in one case negative) inflation rate at the other schools is
unknown.

Private schools
in our database, as noted in the text above and shown in the figure
below, have higher GPAs than public schools. On average,
inflation rates at private schools were higher in the 1990s than they
were in the 2000s. Unlike with public schools, there is no
correlation between GPA and contemporary inflation rates. There
is less variability in inflation rate at private schools in comparison
to public schools.

Two
schools have had inflation rates that have been negligible when 2000 is
used as the base year. At Brigham Young, GPAs have remained
steady year after year. The situation at Princeton is more
complex. An anti-inflation policy was implemented in the 2005
academic year. GPAs dropped by 0.05 points in 2005 and A’s were
no longer the most popular grade. In 2014, that policy was
abandoned. The reason for this abandonment was simple. As
stated by Princeton’s new president, Christopher Eisgruber, the grading
policy was “a considerable source of stress for many students, parents,
alumni, and faculty members.” In other words, customers
complained and the customer is always right. In 2014, average
GPAs at Princeton popped back to about the same level as in 2002 and A
became, once again, the most common grade.

Not
shown on the graph (and not included in our estimate of a 0.10 rise per
decade rise in GPA for private schools since 2000) because it’s an
extreme outlier is Wellesley. In 2000, Wellesley had the highest
average GPA in our database, 3.55. In 2003, Wellesley approved a
grade deflation policy where the mean grade in 100-level and 200-level
courses with 10 or more students was expected to be no higher than 3.33
(B+). GPAs dropped dramatically, down to 3.28 in 2005. No other
school in our database (and I’m certain no school anywhere in the US)
has had a drop or rise in GPA anywhere close to this size over a period
of two years. Since then, average GPAs at Wellesley have crept
back up at a rate of about 0.09 per decade, but were still in the B+
range as of 2014. The grade deflation policy of Wellesley
essentially set its GPA clock back twenty years.

There
are other private schools that have restricted high grades. For
example, the average GPA of Reed College graduates hovered between 3.12
and 3.20 from 1991 and 2008 as a result of a school-wide grading
policy. Whether average GPAs still hover within that range is
unknown.

My
attitude about these top-down clamps on grades (to be fair, Princeton’s
past effort to deflate grades was not strictly top-down; the change was
approved overwhelmingly by the faculty) is positive. Leadership
nationwide created the incentives that caused A’s to become the most
common grade. They need to be the ones to create incentives to
bring back honest grading.

Some
have made statements that grade inflation in the consumer era has been
driven by the rise of adjunct faculty. But inflation rates are
high at schools with low numbers of adjuncts. If anything, schools with
high levels of adjunct faculty have experienced lower rates of consumer
era grade inflation. Every instructor is inflating grades,
whether they are tenure-track or not. The influence of adjunct
faculty on grades has been overstated. I’ll get back to this
point when I discuss grades at community colleges.

Grade Variation Between Disciplines and As a Function of School Selectivity

It
is commonly said that there is more grade inflation in the sciences
than in the humanities. This isn't exactly correct. What is true is
that both the humanities and the sciences have witnessed rising grades
since the 1960s, but the starting points for the rise were different.
Below are data from our paper published in 2010.
The gray dots represent GPA differences between major disciplines at
individual schools. The colored lines indicate averages.
The grading differential between the sciences and humanities has been
present for over five decades. For those interested in such things,
those in the social sciences - like true politicians - tend to grade
between the extremes of the humanities and natural sciences.

What
have sometimes changed are student attitudes about grade differences
between disciplines. They used to be accepted with a shrug. My
own personal observation is that students at relatively high-grading
schools are so nervous about grades today - paradoxically this
nervousness seems to increase with increased grade inflation - that the
shrug sometimes turns into a panic. This “paradox” perhaps can be
explained by the compression of grades at the top caused by grade
inflation. For example, our dataset suggests that at a small
number of private schools in the country solid A’s (and A+ grades) are
so common that a GPA in excess of 3.75 is now required to achieve any
level of graduation with honors. At those schools, an A- means being
one step further away from receiving formal recognition as an
outstanding student; a B+ can be “devastating.”

The
increased nervousness of students about grades over the last thirty
years can be overstated. Humanities majors and classes have
become increasingly unpopular despite their nearly universally high
grades. Students flock to economics despite its tendency to grade
more like a natural science than a social science. The bottom
line is that grading nearly everywhere is easy. After 50 plus
years of grade inflation across the country, A is the most popular
grade in most departments in most every college and
university.

It
is said that grade inflation is by far the worst in Ivy League schools.
This isn't exactly correct. We discuss this issue at length in our 2010
and 2012 research papers. Grades are rising for all schools and
the average GPA of a school has been strongly dependent on its
selectivity since the 1980s.

Attempts to Relate Recent Grade inflation
to Improved Student Quality and Other Factors

Some
administrators and professors have tried to ascribe much of the
increase in GPA in the consumer era to improvements in student quality.
Almost all of these statements linking GPA to the presence of better
students have been qualitative in nature. But there have been some
attempts, notably at Duke, Texas and Wisconsin, to quantify this
relationship using increases in SAT or ACT as a surrogate for increases
in student quality.

Such
quantitative efforts are of dubious worth because even the organization
that administers the SAT test, the College Board, is unable to show
that SAT scores are a good predictor of college GPA. A study by the
University of California system of matriculates showed that SAT scores
explained less than 14% of the variance in GPA. Bowen and Bok, in a
1998 analysis of five highly selective schools, found that SAT scores
explained only 20% of the variance in class ranking. Their analysis
also indicated that a 100-point increase in SAT was responsible for, at
most, a 5.9 percent increase in class rank, which corresponds to
roughly a 0.10 increase in GPA. This result matches that of Vars and
Bowen who looked at the relationship between SAT and GPA for 11
selective institutions. McSpirit and Jones in a 1999 study of grades at
a public open-admissions university, found a coefficient of 0.14 for
the relationship between a 100-point increase in SAT and GPA.

In our 2010 Teachers College Record
paper, we found, similar to Bowen and Bok and Vars and Bowen, a 0.1
relationship between a 100-point increase in SAT and GPA using data
from over 160 institutions with a student population of over two
million.

At both Texas and
Duke, GPA increases of about 0.25 were coincident with mean SAT
increases (Math and Verbal combined) in the student population of about
50 points. At Wisconsin, ACT increases of 2 points (the equivalent to
an SAT increase of about 70 points) were coincident with a GPA rise of
0.21. The above mentioned studies indicate that student quality
increases cannot account for the magnitude of grade inflation observed.
The bulk of grade inflation at these institutions is due to other
factors.

While local
increases in student quality may account for part of the grade rises
seen at some institutions, the national trend cannot be explained by
this influence. There is no evidence that students have improved in
quality nationwide since the early1980s.

The
influence of affirmative action is sometimes used to explain consumer
era grade inflation. However, much of the rise in minority enrollments
occurred during a time, the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, when grade
inflation waned. As a result, it is unlikely that affirmative action
has had a significant influence.

Yet
grades continue to rise.There is little doubt that the resurgence of
grade inflation in the 1980s principally was caused by the emergence of
a consumer-based culture in higher education. Students are paying
more for a product every year, and increasingly they want and get the
reward of a good grade for their purchase. Administrators and
college leaders agree with these demands because the customer is always
right. In this culture, professors are not only compelled to grade
easier, but also to water down course content. Both intellectual rigor
and grading standards have weakened. The evidence for this is not
merely anecdotal. Students are highly disengaged from learning, are studying less than ever, and are less literate.

Internal
university memos say much the same thing. For example, the chair of
Yale's Course of Study Committee, Professor David Mayhew, wrote to Yale
instructors in 2003, "Students who do exceptional work are lumped
together with those who have merely done good work, and in some cases
with those who have done merely adequate work." In 2001, Dean Susan
Pedersen wrote to the Harvard faculty:

"We
rely on grades not only to distinguish among our students but also to
motivate them and the Educational Policy Committee worries that by
narrowing the grade differential between superior and routine work,
grade inflation works against the pedagogical mission of the
Faculty....While accepting the fact that the quality our students has
improved over time, pressure to conform to the grading practices of
one's peers, fears of being singled out or rendered unpopular as a
'tough grader,' and pressures from students were all regarded as
contributory factors...."

The Era of A Becoming Ordinary

In
the Vietnam era, grades rose partly to keep male students from flunking
out (and ending up being drafted into war). But the consumer era
is different. It’s about helping students look good on paper,
helping them to “succeed.” It’s about creating more and more A
students. As the chart below (updated from our 2012 paper)
indicates, B replaced C as the most common grade and Ds and Fs became
less common in the Vietnam era. The consumer era, in contrast,
isn’t lifting all boats. Ds and Fs have not declined
significantly on average, but A has replaced B as the most common
grade. As of 2013, A was the most common grade by far and was
close to becoming the majority grade at private schools.
America’s professors and college administrators have been promoting a
fiction that college students routinely study long and hard,
participate actively in class, write impressive papers, and ace their
tests. The truth is that, for a variety of reasons, professors
today commonly make no distinctions between mediocre and excellent
student performance and are doing so from Harvard to CSU-San Bernardino.

Where Recent Grade Inflation Is Absent

While
grade inflation is pervasive at America's four-year colleges and
universities, it is no longer taking place everywhere. As noted
above, grades have reached a plateau at a small, but significant number
of schools (about 15 percent of the schools in our database).
Will this plateau be long lived? Will other schools follow their
lead? Both prospects aren’t likely. There are too many forces on
these institutions to keep them resistant to the historical and
contemporary fashion of rising grades. Administrators continue to
be focused on satisfying their student customers. Some deans and
presidents are concerned about educational rigor, but they do
eventually leave and are not usually replaced with like-minded
people. Witness what recently happened at Princeton as an example
of this kind of change. Student course evaluations are
still used for tenure and promotion. High school grades continue
to go up, which makes new college students less and less familiar with
non-A grades. Tuition continues to rise, which makes both
students and parents increasingly feel that they should get something
tangible for their money. It’s not surprising that schools with
the highest tuition not only tend to have the highest grades, but have
grades that continue to rise significantly.

Where
has the fashion of rising grades ended? I haven’t focused on data
from community colleges, but Chris Healy has collected data from over
one hundred of them. The data indicate that, at least when it
comes to averages, grades have stopped rising at those schools.
GPAs actually dropped on average by 0.04 points from 2002 to
2012. The national data in the chart below are in agreement
with average grades published by the California Community Colleges
System, which show a drop in grades in the 2000s. The average
GPAs in our database over the time period 1995-2011 are identical to
those from the CCC System, 2.75. That number may seem low in
comparison to four-year college data, but it is similar to the
average GPA of first-year and second-year students at a typical
four-year public school. It’s actually about 0.1 points higher than the
recent average GPAs of first-year and second-year students at a
commuter university like UW-Milwaukee, which suggests that community
colleges, relative to talent-level, are grading very generously even by
contemporary standards.

The
graph above was done in an admittedly slap-dash fashion. I’ve simply
taken every data point Chris has collected, put it in a spreadsheet and
plotted averages every five years (smoothed over a five year interval)
from 1963 to 2008 and then added 2011 (to plot the most recent data for
comparison).

A is the most
common grade at community colleges. That transition occurred two
decades earlier than it did at four-year schools. Vietnam era
grade inflation produced the same rise in average GPA, 0.4 points. But
the consumer era rise in average GPA is much more modest at community
colleges and totals about 0.1 points (a rise to a 2.8 average
GPA) at its peak. Then the percentage of A’s drops slightly over
the last third of the consumer era for which we have data. Note
that the percentage of Fs begins to rise at the end of the Vietnam era
and that percentage more than doubles by 2011. Just like at
four-year schools, A’s and B’s are unrealistically common at community
colleges. But grade rises ended over a decade ago at two-year
schools nationally (of course there are exceptions to this average
behavior) and at schools in the California Community Colleges
System.

Adjunct teaching
percentages are high at these schools, administrators treat students as
customers at these schools, and student course evaluations are
important at these schools, but grades declined in the 2000s.
Why? I don’t know, but because this is a web post, I feel
comfortable to speculate. One factor may be that tuition is low
at these schools, so students don’t feel quite so entitled.
Another factor may be that community college students come, on average,
from less wealthy homes, so students don’t feel quite so
entitled. The mostly steady rise of F grades since the end of the
Vietnam era suggests that the overall quality of students at community
colleges has been in a steady decline for decades. Perhaps no
amount of consumerism can make up for a student population that is
increasingly unprepared for college work or doesn’t show up.

Note on Sample Changes Over Time

The
general trends seen in our latest update are identical to those in our
previous updates. It is a limitation of our work that we can’t
sample the same institutions every time. These are not easy data
to find or get in the quantities we need to make assessments.
Universities and colleges that historically have given us data
sometimes say no to new requests and we have to find other schools that
will say yes (increasingly, this means that we have to agree to
confidentiality agreements and can’t publicly display individual
data). When schools that once publicly displayed data online stop
doing so, we have to drop them from our database. We add new
schools we find that have data online.

Despite
this limitation, our numbers stay almost exactly the same with every
sampling. Historical numbers on average percent A’s in this
update are the same as those found in our 2012 paper (which had much
more extensive data). Historical numbers on average GPAs for
private schools in the latest update are all about one percent lower
than found in previous updates. The fact that we are getting the
same numbers (that agree with historical studies) with every update
gives us confidence that our results not only accurately reflect trends
in grading over time but also accurately measure average GPAs and
average grade distributions for any year for which we have data.

Additional Contributions Wanted

If
you have verifiable data on grading trends not included here, and would
like to include it on this web site, please contact me, Stuart
Rojstaczer. I will acknowledge your contribution by name or if you prefer, the data's origin will remain anonymous.

For More Information

For those interested in even more detail, here are some links to other material.

Original article that started it all (published in the Washington Post), here.

What else I do beside crunch grade numbers with Chris Healy once every five to seven years, here.

The Data Currently Available

The
data presented here come from a variety of sources including
administrators, newspapers, campus publications, and internal
university documents that were either sent to me or were found through
a web search. If you see any errors, please report them. Most of the
data are at least several years in length.

Some
of the data originated as charts. I digitized these charts using
commercially available software. Some of the data were reported in
terms of grade point average (GPA). A good deal of the data were in
terms of percent grade awarded. I converted these data into GPA using
formulae that I developed using data at other schools for which we have
both GPA and grade distribution data or through direct calibration with
limited data on GPAs at these institutions.

To
obtain data on GPA trends, click on the institution of interest. Note
that the data consist of two types, "GPA equivalent" and standard GPA.
GPA equivalent is not the actual mean GPA of a given class year, but
represents the average grade awarded in a given year or semester. GPAs
for a graduating class can be expected to be higher than the GPA
equivalent. When data sources do not indicate how GPAs were computed, I
denote this as "method unspecified." All non-anonymous sources are
stated on the data sheets. Some schools have given me data with
the requirement that they be kept confidential.